Perhaps not surprisingly, Atlantic Cities emphasizes that the next study should look at contextual variation. I would say the next study should vary characteristics of the person giving the signals (and, what is not unrelated, have more than one person giving the signals). Perhaps we will see a Dan Hamermesh study on whether beautiful people do a better or worse job of generating feelings of social connection sometime soon ...

Also, while the summary is explicit that the subjects were randomly chosen, it is not clear that the treatments were; this matters.

Bonus statistics question: is the sample size in this study one or 282?